Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1505114
could define different materials more clearly. Like his skin compared to the thick, plate-like cordyceps that cover large areas of his body, serving as armor that is impenetrable to even high-powered rifle bullets. He also has spore pods on him that look like barnacles and have their own material properties again. All of these materials were simulated differently as he moved. The cordyceps plates needed to stay a lot more rigid and slide over each other, while the skin needed to stretch. The fat layer needed to have a believable amount of jiggle to it, while the spore pods were either pinned down in place or slid against underlying tissue, depending on where they were placed on the body. Dennis Yoo: The battle scene had most of our crowd animation and all of our Infected creatures and monsters. We postvis'ed several of the shots in order to quickly find the numbers of crowd we needed with basic staging. This was helpful to do in order to find the anima- tion that needed to be pushed into our final work. The last shot of our work in the sequence is my favorite shot, and is fully CGI, except for the foreground plate the camera push- es past. It's the wide shot of the destruction that has unfolded throughout the sequence. We also had a hand in the camera, where we crane up over the scene where the Bloater is center frame, with Infected streaming past him racing toward the city. C G W : W H A T A R E S O M E O F T H E T O O L S Y O U R T E A M U S E D T O C R E A T E T H E S H O W ' S V F X ? Dennis Yoo: On the motion side of things, the soware we used for the capturing of motion is primarily MotionBuilder, where we stream the motion data live on set to review our takes and performances. The takes get prepped and mapped for our animators by the motion editors using Nuance. This is a process to ensure the motion properly sits onto our characters. We also use Nuance to edit our motion, using the soware's unique tools / ability to manipulate a rigid FK [forward kinemat- ics] puppet (solely using joint rotations). The keyframe animators use Maya, where they can also edit the motion using a puppet with animatable controls with a mixture of FK rotations, IK [inverse kine- matics] translation controls, and blend shapes, usually for facial mo- tion. The animators also use Maya to keyframe animation (pose-to- pose animation) where we need to create realistic motion without motion capture, usually because the motion is difficult or impossible to capture. We also use a proprietary real-time renderer that we call Gaze- bo. We render all our animation presentations with Gazebo, which includes image plates of the shot footage, our CGI characters, base shading, lighting / shadows, bloom, depth of field, screen space am- bient occlusion, and FX cards. Kendra Ruczak is the Managing Editor of CGW. Wētā uses Gazebo, a proprietary real-time renderer.